Messages - Maxfield

I don't know if anybody's tried this before, but here goes. I got a couple of metal textures, and a bumpmap. Now, normal Anim8or procedure is to have the same texture in the diffuse and ambient channels, but I tried something else.

I put the bump map into the ambient channel and set it to -1. In the "Textures" section of the material editor, I set the ambient to "Lighten". Next I press the little "divorce" button that unhooks the ambient from the diffuse, and set the ambient color to black.

I put the texture map into the diffuse channel and set it to 2.

Behold - the bumpmap acts as a dirt or grunge map.

I've experimented with putting the bumpmap into the specular channel, and/or setting the diffuse channel to "Darken". You get subtly different effects.

Note - in Scene mode, increasing the ambient light in the scene makes it DARKER when you use negative ambient materials. Also, it can flip the colors into negative as well, so it works best with greyscale maps.

There's two renders here, one grunged, the other with the "vanilla" settings that you get with the material editor.

It sounds to me like you may be applying a planar map to the side of the rocket. Try a cylindrical map instead. Select the rocket, press the UV button, then double-click the object. That will give you a choice of mapping layouts.

Better still, download a copy of UVMapper Classic or Lithunwrap. They'll give you more options for unwrapping.

As for the BMP texture, make sure it's 24-bit. AFAIK, Anim8or can't handle 8-bit textures. A quick fix would be to open the image in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, then save as a JPEG.

You can import an .AVI as the background image and layer the effects on top. I've only got the free SE version from years back, but I believe you have to right-click the grey square at the top left of the screen, then select your .AVI movie.

Another way is to make a texture of a white strip on a black background, then blur it a few times. Apply this texture to a flat thin plane, and adjust the ambient, emissive and transparency settings till it looks like a flat lightsaber blade. Copy and paste the plane, rotating it about its long end, till you have a "turbofan" type structure. This will look rounded from most angles.

If you make each of the planes a slightly different width, and rotate the blade on its hilt, you'll get more of a realistic flickering effect.

The advantage of this method is that you can have a truly smooth halo, rather than a stairsteppy one.